期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：This paper investigates the impact on the network growth of the level of merchant discount, the level of Multilateral Interchange Fee (MIF), and the consumers' and the merchants' awareness of positive network e®ects. In an arti¯cial market, in which issuers and acquirers belong to the same network, we simulate explicitly the interactions among consumers and merchants at the point of sale. We allow card issuers to charge ¯xed fees and provide net bene¯ts from card usage, whereas acquirers could charge ¯xed and transactional fee. End users have homogeneous convenience bene¯ts and are able to internalize network e®ects, because to a certain degree consumers are aware of the existence of merchants accepting cards and merchants are aware of the existence of consumers having cards. The MIF °ows from ac- quirers to issuers. We assume there is a maximum level of merchants' discount MD0 (reservation price) that the retailers are willing to pay, depending on the level of convenience bene¯ts they receive. We study the case of imperfect competition, in which some acquirers charge a merchants' discount (MD) higher than MD0, whereas other acquirers charge a MD lower than MD0. We found that in the case, in which consumers' and merchants' awareness is high, retailers face stronger externalities arriving from the set of cardholders that enjoy transac- tional bene¯ts and the set of merchants that accept cards by paying lower transactional fees. In this conditions retailers could be obliged to pay variable fees higher than MD0.
